I wrote my last covid crisis post a few months ago and it was laced with my typical half glass full positivity, but that optimism has now almost left me completely after months of thinking about the world and this situation that we’re living.
For a while, bawling through breakfast has become part of my daily routine. My first mistake, maybe, is checking the news upon awakening to see what happened around the world while I was sleeping. Every day, even now, it seems a bit worse to me. Covid persists throughout the world’s towns, cities, countries, and continents. My home country of America is in a state of complete disaster with both the citizens and the government at war with each other. Over the last few months, there’s been an explosion of collective anger from the killing of innocent victims at the hands of our law enforcement. There was a long and volatile election, which still hasn’t ended because the current president won’t concede to having lost it. Republicans and Democrats have never been more divided. But bigger than politics, the coronavirus has made me reflect on our world at the moment and I'm asking myself if anything is really just, fair, or right in it. We're not living within our means and the environment has been stretched to unsustainability. Climate change is worsening and little is being done to save us from this catastrophe. There are people in the world who have nothing and then a handful of others who have sums of wealth larger than what could ever be necessary for one being. Our justice system punishes rather than heals those who disobey then expects that they return into society miraculously cured from the traumas that put them there in the first place. Currently, everyone except white men, is fighting for rights of equality in a never-ending battle against discrimination and supremacy. Is our world really all that pretty? Nature certainly is, but not the governments, economies, systems, and institutions we’ve constructed to live in it.
At the end of the last quarantine we had here in Italy, I took my daughter outside and sat on a bench while she enjoyed the park for the first time in ages. I looked around and all was quiet as most people were still in their houses. A breeze blew softly across my face and I noticed that the grass, which hadn’t been cut in months, was taking over the once manicured spaces. I could see that without people, nature would carry on harmoniously. The plants and trees would continue to grow rapidly and they would eventually cover all the buildings, objects, and places we had once constructed for our occupancy. All of our prized material possessions, which we had worked so hard to claim, would easily vanish into nothing. They'd decompose and dissipate back into the earth from where they had originally been extracted and made.
Like I said from the start, I normally don't see the glass half empty, but my empathic heart can't help but hurt from how we are living and I now wonder if everything really will be ok in the end, or if we've created a world with too many problems to fix and a planet that may be better off without our existence.